My business partner, Danny Thornton and I have been doing some work on our website in an effort to draw more traffic. The motivation for this was a post by Frank Schulte-Ladbeck entitled Considering a PPC campaign, Displaying Ads on Your Site, and Text Link Ads. If you have not had the opportunity to read his post, I would highly recommend checking it out.
In his post Frank talks about incresed visitors to his site that may be directly attributable to his use of Google AdSense's pay per click campaign. Google promotes three AdSense options:
- AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.
- AdSense for search allows website publishers to provide Google web and site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages.
- AdSense for mobile content - Have a mobile website? AdSense can help you earn money from your content with a simple, integrated solution.
I explored the first option, AdSense for content, as this sounded like the least intrusive and most relevant. Once the code is generated by Google, I added it to our website. Immediately after editing it and publishing it (it wasn't viewable using the preview option) I pulled up our website as any visitor might. To my suprise, the PPC contained ads for other lenders and realtors. While these other lenders and realtors may or may not offer quality services, we are trying to generate business for ourselves and our business partners! I immediately removed the code and looked a bit deeper into AdSense. AdSense does allow for the filtering of competitor ads by placing the competitors url into a filter box. While this might seem on the surface to be an easy thing to do, it is not. Consider all the lenders and brokers and realtors that advertise using this PPC service and you can get an idea of the number of urls I would have to exclude. I did not really have the time nor inclination to spend a day or more seeking out urls to exclude so I opted not to use Google AdSense. This does not mean it will not work for you.
I still wanted to attract the type of visitors that Frank wrote about so I was off in search of a similar program. Danny had been using Incent Reward for some time now on several of his various blogs and seemed to be getting a good amount of traffic. This was a viable option. Incent Reward allows you to choose from a multitude of advertisers that might be of interest to your sites' visitors. They offer the same PPC type of revenue generation as Google AdSense. I went through their list of advertisers until I saw some that visitors might be interested in. I went through the same cut and past of html code that I had with the AdSense code. When I had finished and published the site with the new code, I pulled the site up, again as any visitor would. Needless to say, I am delighted with the finished product. If you notice the banner below, this is an example of a Incent Reward PPC ad.
Happy with the banners and hopeful that it would draw more visitors to our site, I did a little more fine tuning. I added the RSS Feed from our Active Rain Blogs under our respective information. I moved the Plugoo widget under my information, as I am the one who does the instant messaging when someone uses that widget. The loan calculator was revamped and moved under Danny's information and we added a Contact Information Form to the bottom of the main page. It is our hope that these changes will be user friendly and drive more business our way and to our business partners!
If you have a minute and are inclined to check it out, please let me know what you think! Good! Bad! How Can I Improve It?
About the Author If you are in the market to purchase a home or even refinance an existing loan and you want a loan officer that will walk with you every step of the way, then contact Danny or Rich of the Thornton Team at Home America Mortgage today. We can have you pre-approval in as little as 4 hours. You can visit our website or send an email to thorntonteam@homeamericamortgage.com or call us @ 865-951-0522.
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